Kwan-Liu Ma


Kwan-Liu Ma is an American computer scientist. He was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan and came to the United States for pursuing advanced study in 1983. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include visualization, computer graphics, human computer interaction, and high-performance computing.

Biography

Ma received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees all in computer science from the University of Utah in 1986, 1988, and 1993, respectively. During 1993-1999, Ma was a staff scientist at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering, , where he conducted research in scientific visualization and high-performance computing. Ma joined UC Davis faculty in July 1999 and funded the Visualization and Interface Design Innovation research group and UC Davis Center of Excellence for Visualization.
Ma is a leading researcher in Big Data visualization. He organized the NSF/DOE Workshop on Large Scientific and Engineering Data Visualization in 1999 as well as the Panel on Visualizing Large Datasets: Challenges and Opportunities at ACM SIGGRAPH 1999. He participated in the NSF LSSDSV, ITR, and BigData programs, and led the DOE SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization, a five-year, multi-institution project. He and his students has convincingly demonstrated several advanced concepts for data visualization, such as in situ visualization, visualization provenance, hardware accelerated volume visualization, machine learning assisted volume visualization, explorable images, machine learning assisted graph visualization, etc. Ma has published over 350 articles and given over 250 invited talks.
Ma has been actively serving the research community by playing leading roles in several professional activities including VizSec, Ultravis, EGPGV, IEEE VIS, IEEE PacificVis, and IEEE LDAV. He has served as a papers co-chair for SciVis, InfoVis, EuroVis, PacificVis, and Graph Drawing. Professor Ma was associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, and the Journal of Computational Science and Discovery. He presently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Visualization, the Journal of Visual Informatics, and the Journal Computational Visual Media.
Ma is a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.
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